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  1. Steve: Haha!

    Lubuntu, didn’t know that one yet. Might be worthe remembering. Totally know what you mean about Ubuntu… Still can’t understand people keep using it. :-p

    Nice work on the Toshiba! Now you have a fun little writing machine you can bring with you everywh— o wait.

    1. Heh, I didn’t even bother looking at the Canonical version, still afraid they’re using some bizarre window manager like last time I checked. I have to credit Canonical for putting a *lot* of work into making the base distro very polished and functional. They’ve done a great job and it’s nice that there’s a fork like Lubuntu where they’ve stripped out the bloat and gave it a nice, sane lightweight WM like LXDE. It’s very nicely done. (:

  2. $55? Now you have my interest… Ohhhhh hacking the hardware. My favorite thing!

    1. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Toshiba-Portege-M200-Tablet-1-7-GHz-512-MB-RAM-/261576679909

      there’s one on US Ebay $54.99 free shipping. No HD and battery’s prolly toast, but those are easy to get replacements for. If you decide to get one, let me know and I’ll do a post on how to get an OS onto the Toshiba. It’s kind of a dark art involving using an SD card with a floppy boot image to bypass the crippled BIOS and allow USB Booting from a drive key. Toshiba tried to lock down the Portege’s to only booting from a specific external USB CDROM made by them. There are two ways to get around it, and I’ve done both successfully.

      1. Hi, I know this is a bit of a blast from the past but I have just been given one of these and asked if I can get it to work. Don’t suppose you could post some info on the SD/USB magic you allude to above/

        1. If I recall correctly (after 4 years), I had to install the PLOP bootloader on an SD card and boot from that (Toshi M200 seems to only support raw boot from SD card slot on startup – USB sticks or USB CDRoms won’t boot at all, and I vaguely recall that I couldn’t use an SD card larger than 1gb) – and then use PLOP to activate boot from a USB stick for system installation. It was a weird sequence where the M200 sees the SD slot at BIOS post, and then suddenly forgets it’s there after post, so you can’t run the system setup from the SD card either.

          Basically the process was PLOP bootload from SD card, then use PLOP to activate the USB stick boot for the OS setup.

          https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

          1. ahh, yeah, I do recall a lot of hassle getting any SD card to boot on the M200 other than on that was exactly 1gb. The BIOS doesn’t recognize any other value without a BIOS update:
            ” Version 1.30 03-22-2004
            Added support to boot from SD cards of the following sizes: 16MB, 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB and 512MB.”

            https://support.toshiba.com/support/viewContentDetail?contentId=1226747

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